Church, that affirmed the same, than to Wickliffe or Huss, that denied it." The council declared him guilty of his other heterodox opinions, and delivered him over to the magistrates of Constance, who punished him with death, according to the laws of the Empire, and by the express order of the Elector Palatine, and of the Emperor Segismund. On the second of the month come four martyrs; Anne Ascue, John Lacelles, John Adams, and Nicholas Beleman, who all suffered at the same fire in Smithfield, in the last year of the reign of King Henry the eighth, after they had been condemned by Archbishop Cranmer. Very little is recorded of the men, one of whom, Beleman, was a priest, another, Adams, was a taylor, and the third was a servant in the king's household; but of Ascue's case, Fox has made out a very pathetic relation, which is replete like all his other relations of this kind, with falsehood and misrepresentation. She appears to have been the chief, and the men merely her disciples. She was a young woman about twenty five years of age, the wife of a gentleman named John Kime, who resided in Lincolnshire; being of an enthusiastic turn of mind and fond of novelties, she quitted her husband's mansion, and went about endeavouring to make proselytes to her new opinions, which militated against the doctrine of the real presence. She was soon imprisoned by the king, when she made a full profession of her faith, and an explicit declaration, that she believed in the doctrine of the real presence and in transubstantiation, as taught in the Catholic Church: this happened in March 1545. She was however again arraigned before the king's justices at Guildhall, on the thirteenth of June following, "for speaking words against the sacrament of the altar, contrary to the statute of six articles," and again she asserted her belief in the real presence; but in the following year the king learning that she was secretly going about endeavouring to instil a belief of the contrary doctrine into the minds of many, particularly of women, and among others of the queen herself, Catherine Parr, and of his nieces, the daughters of the Duke of Suffolk, he caused her to be again apprehended, and commanded her to be put upon the rack, in order to extort from her, evidence against the queen; and he finally sent her to execution. We now come to Queen Mary's martyrs. The first two, were apprehended by Lord Oxford, and others, and sent up to London to be judged for their opinions and actions; the one was a servant and the other a linendraper: they afterwards suffered at Chelmsford, in Essex. The next two were poor labouring men, and were executed at Colchester. Then follow, two weavers, and one fuller of Coggeshall, in the same ́ county; they were burned in different towns. We have now six poor and illiterate men, who suffered at Lewes, in Sussex, upon the sixth of June, 1555. After these comes a minister named Thomas Adherall, who died a prisoner in the King's Bench prison, and consequently set down for a confessor. The next is also a confessor; because he died in the same prison: then follows a merchant's servant, without a name, who is said to have been executed at Leicester in the same year. Thirteen martyrs now appear upon the list, eleven men and two women, who, according to Fox, were condemned " for their stout standing to their opinions :" yet some of them refused to answer the questions that were put to them, "because," says their annalist," of their simplicity." They all died at the same fire at Stratford, in Essex, in the year 1556. There are still for this month nineteen men and twelve women of Queen Mary's martyrs, besides four men confessors; but as their cases exactly resemble the preceding, it would be tiring the reader to recapitulate their names and occupations. All of them were persons in the lowest walks of life, poor, and without education; but self-opiniated and obstinate in the extreme: one of them at least, Richard Woodman, an ironmaker, seems to have considered himself a great doctor, for if we were to believe him or Fox, he disputed with his judges during several days, and on each day bore away the palm of victory. The heterodox opinions for which these infatuated people suffered, were the prevailing heresies of the day, founded principally upon the doctrines of Zwinglius and Calvin. The examinations of several among them, are to be met with in the Acts and Monuments, and their answers form a striking contrast to those made by the primitive martyrs of the Catholic Church: for in these, a spirit of piety, a perfect resignation to the divine will, and a firm faith in the doctrines of the church as taught by the apostles and their successors, were manifest in all their words and actions; whereas in Fox's Martyrs, pride, obstinacy, and a head-strong reliance upon their own feeble judgments, and unsettled opinions, appear to have been the treacherous guides which conducted them all to the stake. The law, De comburendo heretico, by which these poor deluded beings suffered, was enforced both in the reign of Elizabeth and of James the First: it was however repealed under Charles the Second, at the instance of the puritans. Yet laws more cruel in their operation were enacted by the virgin queen, which were almost daily acted upon during her long reign, and were frequently employed against the Catholics by James the First and by the two Charles's; but as Catholics alone were the victims of these sanguinary laws, our impartial historical writers generally pass them over with very few, or trivial remarks. And benign as is said to be the influence of the doctrines of the established church, as by law established, still in her brightest days, many a hapless old woman has met with a violent death in virtue of the act which subjected wizards and witches to the stake and to the fire, and no liberal ray, which her enlightened dogmas were supposed to diffuse, ever reached for near two centuries the suffering Catholics, who were doomed for clinging to the faith as once delivered to the saints, to groan under many a galling law, which the policy of a ruthless woman first invented, and to which the factious and persecuting spirit of aftertimes, had forced our monarchs to give their sauction, and even to encrease the number of these merciless enactments. To the Editor of the Catholic Miscellany. SIR,-It seems the short article I formerly sent you about the Doleful Fall, has caused a little discussion. I formerly asserted the author of the work in question to be Dr. N. French, bishop of Ferns, which is undoubtedly true. Some one in the Catholic Spectator has been pleased to controvert it. I wish you had transferred this article from the Spectator to your Miscellany, for I was perfectly unaware that my assertion was controverted, till your last number discovered to me an article from a third person, who has taken up my defence. I do not write now to defend my former opinion, which I think stands in no need of fresh arguments, but to point out some little inaccuracies, which shew how liable we all are to error. Every word of my former article is I think quite correct, except those contained within the parenthesis, in which I ventured a supposition that the initials J. S. might mean the famous John Sargeant. I now recall that opinion, and think they were the signature of J. Brown, who perhaps adopted the preposterous initials of his order, J. S. for S. J. While I am upon this subject, I cannot help pointing out another error, into which even Sir James Ware himself seems to have fallen. His language conveys to me the idea, that Dr. French's Bleeding Iphigenia, was the same work as his Doleful Fall. Now this cannot well be. The Bleeding Iphigenia was written as an apology for his own conduct, and that of his bleeding country, which he calls Iphigenia, in the confederacy of Kilkenny, and the subsequent rebellion as some call it, or self defence which the bishop styles it. The object of Iphige. nia was to prove the lawfulness of the rebellion, if we may be allowed the expression. For lawful it would have been considered had it been successful. For "Treason never prospers. What's the reason? The second work was written solely to remonstrate with his former but now fallen friend Andrew Sall, and in order to reclaim him if possible. How two works, so opposite in their intentions, can possibly be the same, I am unable to understand. I remain, your's, "O tell it not in Gath! let it not be published in the streets of Askalon!" As we are the wicked children of Askalon, notwithstanding the solemn prohibition, we cannot help proclaiming in all the public streets the proceedings of the Bible Society, when they are particularly interesting, and even glorying in her shame. We have already sinned in this way, in the copious extracts we have given in our preceding numbers from the works of Abbe 7thly. We have laid out of the case those accounts which require no more than a simple assent, and we now also lay out of the case those which came merely in affirmance of opinions already formed. This last circumstance is of the utmost importance to notice well. It has long been observed that Popish miracles happen in Popish countries, that they make no converts which proves that they are accepted when they fall in with principles already fixed, with the public sentiments, or with the sentiments of a party already engaged on the side the miracle supports, which would not be attempted to be produced in the face of enemies, in opposition to reigning tenets-or favourite prejudices." Now the miracles recorded in Christian history, were wrought in the midst of enemies, under a government, a priesthood, and a magistracy, decidedly and vehemently adverse to them, and to the pretentions which they supported.....They were Popish miracles in the midst of Protestants....No part of this description belongs to the ordinary evidence of Popish miracles." "In appreciating the credit of any miraculous story, these are the distinctions which relate to the evidence." Now every one who shall apply these distinctions of evidence, to the miracles which form the subject of present controversy, must acknowledge that they are in no manner affected by them. So evidently on the contrary; do these distinctions favour the miracles under discussion, that one might suppose them to have been laid down as so many motives, upon which their credibility may be established. They are events quite recent, which have taken place in our own country: they are affirmed upon oath,corroborated by the strongest collateral testimony, confimed by the nicest particularities: they deeply interest the religious feelings of persons of every belief: they are truly Catholic miracles in a Protestant country; finally, from the reasoning of a Protestant Archdeacon it follows, that, in point of evidence, they rise superior to every miracle since the first age of Christianity, and rank on a level with those of Christ and the Apostles. 1 It is true that the 6th and 7th distinctions upon which the author whom I have cited insists, at much greater length than on any of the others, and which seem designed to exclude all |